Irenosen Okojie: Butterfly Fish

When they came, I was clinging to her, holding on so tightly, it took two of the crew to pry me away. Mentally, I recorded every detail. The slight dent on the bridge of her nose I used to rub the pad of my finger against as a little girl. The pointy chin that jutted out defiantly, the faint lines fanned out at the corner of her eyes and above her full top lip, a few stray hairs I’d never noticed before. Those and the beauty spot on her neck, right where her toffee coloured skin became a little lighter. Her perfume competed with the more insistent aroma of old, cold food nonetheless it reached me, the thin, sweet scent of peach she’d worn my whole life. In primary school, when she picked me up, I’d leap into her arms as she raggedly hoisted me up, resting my head on her sweet-scented shoulder. Then I’d tuck my hand under her jaw and try to carry her small oval face gently, as if it were an egg.

Inside the ambulance the crew stayed silent as they attempted to resuscitate her. It was the law . I wanted to touch her face again. They let me hold her hand. Her skin felt cool. Why hadn’t they let me pack an overnight bag? She’d want to get out of those clothes in the morning. I made a note to myself to bring her some fresh underwear, her Shea butter cream, her comb and house slippers.

I said to her, “You know how much you hate hospitals.” The silence seemed to concur.

“We’ll be there soon,” I murmured, watching for any sign of movement. “I’ll make sure you’re put in a nice ward, I’ll speak to the doctor.”

“Is there anybody you want to call?” the female crewmember asked. “It may make things a little easier for you. It’s a lot to take in, finding her like that…”

“Why would I need to call anyone?” My voice rang out shrill in the small moving space.

Then the ambulance stopped and the back doors opened. A woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform rushed to us at the ambulance bay area.

The female crewmember (Ann I think her name was) came over and touched me gently on the arm. “I’m sorry Miss but you have to let go now.”

Sudden cardiac arrest. Gone. No explanations. There was nothing in her medical history to suggest that this could ever happen. The autopsy failed to reveal anything and I wondered angrily what the point of it was. All I knew was that when she really needed me, I wasn’t there.

My last meeting with her was etched deep in my memory. I’d felt human again because of it. It had been a rare day off for us, both from our jobs and our roles even, as mother and daughter. We were barefoot on the park grass, she, casually sipping from a box of Mr Juicy orange juice, while I chased the ice cream van, my hat falling off in the process. Later we took turns to push each other on the swings, even though she didn’t want to, kept on about being too grown for that and then once on the swing, she forcefully gripped the metal chain-link arms that anchored her to the weathered wooden seat and there had been something so childlike about the way she’d kicked her legs in the air as I pushed her as hard as I could so she could fly, her voice flailing high above, full of laughter and happy fear. Then, the rain came down like a curtain on a final act, and we walked arm in arm in quiet contentment while raindrops kissed our noses and the wet ground tickled our bare feet.

My hands are full and as I return to the hospital to be with her body, I hold this memory gingerly, frightened in case any part of it should fall and scatter over the ground. If it did, how could I rebuild the dripping ice cream, or her mouth widening in shock at the coolness of it against her teeth and us walking around with our shoes off as if we didn’t have a care in the world.

The bus finally arrived in Whitechapel. I pressed the stop button and hopped off, relieved at making it through a plethora of sweaty bodies. The streets were bursting, people swarming this way and that. I wondered who of them had lost their mothers, who’s chests were now holes filled with the fragments of memories. There are certain lies you tell yourself to stumble blindly through the bereavement. After the reality cracks you in two, you tell yourself that things will be okay. That time will erode the numbness away; you glue the split inside together by forcing yourself out of bed in the mornings, eating cereal with hot milk and leaving the radio on at every opportunity, scared of your own thoughts. And some nights when the loneliness is so bad and a frayed, rough desperation courses through your veins, you pick up your phone book and trace the cobwebs off names you suddenly want to leap over the margins to sit beside you.

Amidst the throng of people I watched couples. Some appeared anxious, some amorous. Most were oblivious to world beyond the other’s gaze. Jagged pangs of longing unexpectedly hit me like mouths beneath the skin cutting across organs. I longed to be in love, to have a lover. I felt sad, inadequate and lonely. What must it be like to never feel the mumbled words of a lover become handwriting against your jaw?

As I hit the steps of The Royal London Hospital to pick up my mother’s items, my thoughts flapped at crossed purposes sending me meandering down conflicting dead ends. Might I die like that too …? Suddenly end up so still …. Weighing in, heavier than the rest is the last thought, the moment when I first arrived at the hospital when I was convinced mum would rouse, groggy but still fighting. I really did, right up to the point where she disappeared behind the large shrieking double doors with the NHS regulation blue and white paint peeling off. But she didn’t. She became in that moment an imaginary being even, as evidenced by the thumping of my heart, she existed as still real through me. I saw myself clearly caught between life as I once knew it and life never being the same again.

I stood still on the hospital’s grey steps, absorbing the nurses in their crisply ironed uniforms, the inaudible chatter of jaded ambulance men, people clutching official looking envelopes and folded letters, the tearing away of tires in the distance, all part of some strange, orchestral music the city produced. Everything stuck to the magnet of my pulse. I saw myself sitting on a crumbling rock, swatting cobwebs away from my privates frantically. When a tiny speck of rock was left, I fell to a bottom lined with broken eggshells.

If I’d been born a water baby, I’d liquefy into coffee-stained mugs so people could drink me and taste peach iced tea. On the London Underground during summer my clothes would become wet to cool me down and make a stunted river for the seven lives in my feet to float. I chewed on these thoughts as I watched Mrs Harris front crawl in our local pool, her movements slick in the water.

I was waist deep in the shallow end, walking on water trying to warm myself up. The pool was shrouded in a strange pulsing blue light. A young lifeguard in his high chair looked bored, stroked his whistle and the dormant sweet screams it carried, while the wet floor beneath him was slippery with invisible verrucas. I watched the kids at the opposite end fling themselves into the water in beautiful, awkward shapes that died on the surface. Their yells pierced the distance between us. My hair was wet, my skin tingled and a pair of white goggles felt tight on my head. I went under. I longed for Marpessa, my old SLR camera, to be waterproof so her greedy, rotating lens could capture the black lines that created lanes, the strokes that continued swimming after you exited the pool and the silver carpet of forks at the bottom nobody else saw. So I could tap people on their shoulders and say, “Excuse me, can I take pictures of your kick?” I named my camera after the actress Marpessa Dawn: both were black, magical, and mysterious. Having her had taught me how to embrace inanimate objects.